which, though his aims were nominally mine, I could
not attain to. For me the man was the central figure; if I had
attention to spare it was on him that I bestowed it; groping
disgustfully after his hidden springs of action, noting the evidences
of great gifts squandered and prostituted; questioning where he was
most vulnerable; whom he feared most, us or his colleagues; whether
he was open to remorse or shame; or whether he meditated further
crime. The girl was incidental. After the first shock of surprise I
had soon enough discovered that she, like the rest, had assumed a
disguise; for she was far too innocent to sustain the deception; and
yesterday was fresh in my memory. I was forced to continue turning
her assumed character to account; but it would be pharisaical in me
to say that I rose to any moral heights in her regard--wine and
excitement had deadened my better nature to that extent. I thought
she looked prettier than ever, and, as time passed, I fell into a
cynical carelessness about her. This glimpse of her home life, and
the desperate expedients to which she was driven (whether by
compulsion or from her own regard for Davies) to repel and dismiss
him, did not strike me as they might have done as the crowning
argument in favour of the course we had adopted the night before,
that of compassing our end without noise and scandal, disarming
Dollmann, but aiding him to escape from the allies he had betrayed.
To Davies, the man, if not a pure abstraction, was at most a noxious
vermin to be trampled on for the public good; while the girl, in her
blackguardly surroundings, and with her sinister future, had become
the very source of his impulse.

And the other players? Boehme was _my_ abstraction, the fortress whose
foundations we were sapping, the embodiment of that systematized
force which is congenital to the German people. In von Bruening, the
personal factor was uppermost. Callous as I was this evening, I could
not help wondering occasionally, as he talked and laughed with Clara
Dollmann, what in his innermost thoughts, knowing her father, he felt
and meant. It is a point I cannot and would not pursue, and, thank
Heaven, it does not matter now; yet, with fuller knowledge of the
facts, and, I trust, a mellower judgement, I often return to the same
debate, and, by I know not what illogical bypaths, always arrive at
the same conclusion, that I liked the man and like him still.

We behaved as sportsmen in the matte